Hot buttered toast is right up there with a nice cup of tea for comfort and sustenance.

Sadly, making it often ends in frustration when your perfect slice falls apart as you try to spread on a cold lump of butter that just won't melt.

Now designers believe they've conquered the problem by inventing a heated knife.

The knife, invented by British baker Warburtons, heats to 41.8 degrees Celsius after research found that is the optimum temperature to spread butter

The knife's heating element ensures a constant temperature of 41.8 degrees centigrade, and is powered by two AA batteries in the handle

Designers have created the world's first knife with a heated blade to solve the age old problem of cold butter not spreading properly on bread

The knife, designed by Warburtons, heats up to 41.8 degrees Celsius, powered by AA batteries in the handle - and melts the butter just enough to spread smoothly, without gouging holes in the bread.

A button on the handle activates the battery-operated heating element and a flashing LED indicates it is on.

The prototype can spread a slice of bread in 30 seconds - although it's not clear when or if it will be released, or how much it will cost.

Researchers created the knife with bread baker Warburtons after a survey found it is the most desired breakfast innovation.

Butter not spreading properly is one of our top five breakfast bugbears along with burnt toast and cold tea.

Stuart Jones, from Warburtons, said: 'We've fine-tuned the knife's specifications to ensure the speediest heat-up and perfect temperature for spreading and we're thrilled with how well it works.

The knife heats to 41.8 degrees Celsius after research found that is the optimum temperature to spread butter

The knife has two AA batteries in the handle and a heating element in the blade

A poll of 3,000 people revealed 1 per cent of Brits - all of them men - have even resorted to heating the spread with a hair dryer to combat the problem.

A quarter - 28 per cent - put the butter in the microwave, 8 per cent put it on a plate on top of the toaster and 7 per cent heat the knife on the hob. The new knife will perfectly cover a slice in butter in less than 30 seconds.

'It made complete sense to develop a tool to help busy Brits achieve the perfect even-spread on their toast, even when using butter straight from the fridge,' says Jones.

'Baking is a blend of expert craft and science and to make the perfect piece of toast it is essential to use a good-quality loaf that offers butterability.' The baker has yet to set a date for production.

You might have experienced misunderstanding in family or official life on several occasions. The reason is obvious that either of the person didn't state his/her stance in clear fashion or perceive it clearly. So where does the fault lie and how can we improve? Let us study the below recommendations which need to be considered by Communicator or Listener in order to have solid common understanding and avoid communication gaps.

1.Improve vocabulary: Every word has its own deep meanings. For example there is a difference between 'Hate' and 'Dislike'. Likewise, there is a difference between 'Should' and 'Must'. To enhance vocabulary you should learn new words and understand the meanings of synonyms and antonyms as well. You can use online dictionaries or built-in features of MS Word (right click on a word to know synonyms/antonyms. article written by Junaid.Tahir

2.Listen carefully and listen more. If you listen more you are absorbing more and improving your level of comprehension. If you speak more you are on the verge of confusing others. So listen more and speak less. And when you speak, speak slowly and softly. Ask if you have communicated clearly or more elaboration is required.3.If you don't understand something, ask for elaboration. It is said that "If you doubt at first, doubt again and clear it"

4.Put yourself in others' shoes to understand their perspective. Think win-win. Analyze the situation from everyone's perspective. Consider all the stake holders and consider their emotions. Develop Emotional Intelligence skill. Google it today. Article written by Junaid.Tahir

5.If you are writing Emails/Letters/Fax then re-read after you are done with typing. Considering point-4 while you review your article. You can ask someone to comment on what you have written.

6.Avoid hard words to avoid bad taste: For example instead of saying 'Rejected' use the word 'Not Approved'. When you say No, you should sound as if you wanted to say Yes but due to specific issue you can't say yes. So if that issue is addressed, you will be saying Yes and Saying Approved. Article written by Junaid.Tahir

7.Avoid too many arguments. Convince or get convinced. If things gets complicated, take a break… engage some well-wishers to assist resolve the matter.

Further, I would recommend understanding Berlos Model of Communication. As per him, there are 4 factors which can ensure strong communication if considered properly. These are Source, Message, Channel & Receiver. By source he means that the speaker needs to have good communication skills, positive attitude, has understanding of cultural aspects and proper knowledge on the subject. By Message he means that the speaker has to use mature and to-the-point wordings. By Channel means that correct medium at correct time (phone call, physical appearance, email, fax) to be used. By Receiver he means that Receiver needs to understand the message clearly. The Receiver's level of understanding, attitude and Listening skills matter a lot.

Conclusion: Effective Communication is an indication of your wisdom and maturity level and is critically important to enhance your personal and professional relationship. Developing this habit will improve your bonds with your friends, colleagues and family members so start working on this starting today…

What are your thoughts on how to improve communication skills in day to day life?

In simple words, Proactive Approach is to plan and align things in advance by foreseeing future risks, problems or challenges.

Having said that, there are three kind of people on earth. Category-1 is those who strategize things as they have the visualization to portray the future. So they organize things in advance in order to avoid any possible set back. I call these people as 'Organizers'. Category-2 is those people who have the reactive methodology to handle things. That means whenever a situation arises they react accordingly. I call these people as 'Reactors'. Although there can be good Reactors but the majority of them are bad Reactors since most of the situations do not give them the luxury of taking a U-Turn for going back to neutral to start again. Category-3 is Commoners. These people do not have control on their lives. They are the product of their circumstances. They automatically flow with the wind; no matter where the wind takes them to. Of course, the first category is the best one as they have a proactive approach to life. So coming back to the track to understand the concept of pro-activeness in more details. Here are some points:

1.Proactiveness is the vision and ability to align the tasks well in advance to avoid mishaps.

2.Proactiveness is to foresee the possible problems and work on the contingencies in parallel with the master plan. It is strongly recommended to execute your contingencies before they execute themselves at the required time, because you never know whether your contingency plan is going to be successful or not. Hence be sure about it by testing the contingency in advance specially when the risk factor is high.

3.Proactive people have the analytical skills to understand any situation in detail so that they can see low level risks and plan accordingly. (You may want to review my article on analytical skills here.

Considering a Tree analogy, I would refer 'The Organizers' as 'The Roots', 'The Reactors' as 'The Branches' and 'The Commoners' as 'The leaves'. Always remember the fact that when the wind blows, its leaves which are impacted at first place. So its Leaf's responsibility to stick to the Tree if they need to live. For Tree, it does not matter if any of the leaf is broken due to strong wind (circumstances). Which category you belong to? Please share your thoughts.

Today we are going for the annual company function at world's tallest building, Burj khalifa park. This function is one of the greatest moments of each employee's life since the annual bonus is announced along with some superb and interesting performances by entertaining agencies. So all of the employees are excited and looking forward to attend it. However, one of my colleagues, who got married recently, is not joining us; the reason being his wife is not feeling well because of backache. Some of the colleagues asked him to join the event because function duration is only 2-3 hours. They insisted him to join because its once-in-a-year experience hence should not be dropped. So my friend had two options:

1-Let his wife stay at home for another couple of hours so he can attend the event and enjoy the cheerful moments with all the friends.2-Drop the event and take care of his wife.

I am glad that he has opted for second option since Point-1 is more of a male perspective and point-2 is more of a family perspective.

My father once advised me that it is ok if due to any reason, I can't attend someone during his/her happy moments but I should ensure to attend my loved ones when they are in crisis. Why is that so?

Always remember, family comes first. The most valuable wealth one possesses is his strong family relations. Money comes, money goes; functions come, functions end but Family relations cannot and should not be compromised at the cost of financial and/or social benefits.

You must have seen so many rich families in crisis because of stringent relationship. So it's not the money it's the Strong family relationship which is an indicator of degree of happiness I wish my friend a happy and prosperous life and advise all of us not to compromise on family Ethics in order to increase Love, Care, happiness and affection in our lives.

Wednesday, 27 June 2012

Passport Tearing at Indian Airports....Read it Carefully.!!! Be Careful at the Indian Airports, This is a well organized conspiracy by Indian Immigration, Police, Customs and Air India staff with networking at all the Indian International Airports.. Be careful when ever you give your passport to Immigration/ Customs/Air India staff. The pass port can be easily tampered and can create trouble to you. They have found easy way of making money from NRIs. This is the way it works:

At the time of the passenger's departure, if the passenger is not looking at the officer while he is stamping the exit, the officer very cleverly tears away one of the page from the passport. When the passenger leaves the immigration counter, the case is reported on his computer terminal with full details. Now all over India they have got full details of the passenger with Red Flag flashing on the Passport number entered by the departure immigration officer. They have made their money by doing above.

On arrival next time, he is interrogated.

Subject to the passenger's period of stay abroad, his income and standing etc., the price to get rid of the problem is settled by the Police and Immigration people. If someone argues, his future is spoiled because there are always some innocent fellows who think the honesty is the basis of getting justice in India .

Please advise every passenger to be careful at the airport. Whenever they hand over the passport to the counters of Air India , or immigration or the customs, they must be vigilant, should not remove eyes from the passport even if the officer in front tries to divert their attention.

Also, please pass this information to all friends, media men and important politicians. Every month 20-30 cases are happening all over India to rob the NRIs the minute he lands. Similar case has happened with Aramco's Arifuddin. He was traveling with his family. They had six passports. They Got the visa of America and decided to go via Hyderabad from Jeddah. They reached Hyderabad .Stayed about a month and left for the States. When they reached the States, the page of the American visa on his wife's passport was missing. At the time of departure from Hyderabad it was there, the whole family had to return to Hyderabad helplessly. On arrival at Bombay back, they were caught by the police and now it is over 2 months, they are running after the Police, Immigration officers and the Courts. On going in to details with him, he found out the following: One cannot imagine, neither can believe, that the Indian Immigration dept can play such a nasty game to harass the innocent passengers.

All the passengers traveling to & fro India via Bombay and Hyderabad must be aware of this conspiracy. Every month 15 to 20cases are taking place, at each mentioned airport, of holding the passengers in the crime of tearing away the passport pages. On interviewing some of them, none of them was aware of what had happened. They don't know why, when and who tore away the page from the middle of the passport. One can imagine the sufferings of such people at the hands of the immigration, police and the court procedures in India after that. The number of cases is increasing in the last 2-3 years. People who are arriving at the immigration, they are questioned and their passports are being held and they have to go in interrogation. Obviously, the conspiracy started about 2 to 3 years ago, now the results are coming. Some of the Air India counter staff too is involved in this conspiracy.

KINDLY SEND THIS TO AS MANY AS YOUR FRIENDS ACROSS THE WORLD AND ALSO REQUEST THEM TO CHECK THE PASSPORT AT THE CHECKING COUNTERS AND BEFORE LEAVING THE AIRPORT

If the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, it's because they take better care of it. ~Cecil Selig

Do you ever wonder why it seems that some peoplehave better attitudes, healthierbodies, and more successfulrelationships thanothers have? It is easy to just look at them and assume that they are just lucky or have it easy as opposed to the rest of us. But more often than not, it is because they work on these areas in their lives.

Positive attitudes are the result of repeatedly making it a habit to be thankful, replacing negative thoughts with positive ones, looking at the good rather than the bad in ourselves and others, and focusing on possibilities and solutionsrather than the problems.Healthy bodies do not just happen either. Our eating habits,exercise, and stress all play a part in our physical well-being. It takes discipline and commitment to resist and limit our intake of unhealthy foods, eat right,exercise at least 3 times a week, relax our bodies and minds,and improve our coping with stress. And finally, successful relationships don't just happen, but require our time and attention. Our relationships are precious and of great value.There is so much we can do toinvest in them and make thembetter.

If we take better care of our mental and physical health, as well as our relationships, it WILL pay off. It may require some extra effort, work and investment, but we will find that it is well worth it!!

When you throw a stone into a pond, you'll see a splash and hear a specific sound generated by the touch of stone with the water. You will notice circles rippling out from the point where stone hit the water. The stone touched the water only once however the number of waves was more than that. Did you also noticed that you did one simple act of throwing a stone but it resulted in several waves generation in all directions travelling to a large distance? This is what we call Ripple Effect.

If you closely observe your day to day life, you will notice that most of your acts are generating ripples in the society since a lot of people are getting affected either positively or negatively. If you are doing a positive act, the ripple effect is going to be positive. For example, if you help your friend or colleague, there is a most likely chance that he will help you and others when he finds you or others in any crisis. Hence I believe that positive acts result in positive ripples and negative effects generate negative ripples. Since this article is going to be read by all kind of intellectuals so I will summarize some basic example of positive and negative ripples. Article written by Junaid Tahir (mjunaidtahir at gmail dotcom)

1-When you share some inspiring article/video/story with your friends through email, Facebook, Google Plus, blog, website or any other online media, it will have a positive impact on hundreds of lives; Just to elaborate, if you have sent this article by email to 100 friends and only 20 of those share the same information with their colleagues/friends then this article will reach and inspire another 20*100 = 2000 people. This won't stop here since these 2000 people are going to share that with another thousands of people so the article consequently touches millions!

2-When you work on some humanity service project (for example, giving some money for charity on monthly basis, opening an orphan house, installing water tanks in areas where water is not available to drink, visiting hospitals to help poor people etc) you are generating an unstoppable ripple effect. Hundreds of people will get inspired by you and start doing the same (more or less) acts.

3-When you want to show your driving 'skills' and 'thrills' by bad or speedy driving while your friends or family members are with you, you are encouraging them to do the same when they are given a chance. These friends will probably do the same and encourage more people for this bad act. Down the road in 6 month you might become the root cause of rash driving for 100+ people or more!

This paragraph is for Muslims only: If we closely think, the positive ripples can become a source of Sadqa Jaria which is extremely required after your death. If you have done something similar to Point-1 and Point-2, these deeds will keep sending you the Hasanat (currency of Aakhirah) in your after-death-bank-account. Always remember that dollars, pounds or euros wont help you on the day of Judgment, the thing which will help you is your acts of kindness and their usage by the society. If you inspire and convince more and more people for any good deed (by your words or by doing the task actually) you are basically ensuring your share in the Hasanat which they is going to do (while their share will not be impacted). Article written by Junaid Tahir. Feel free to give feedback at my blog. http://paradigmwisdom.blogspot.com/

Conclusion: Positive Acts of kindness can bring magical results on earth. Everyone need to understand the concept that all of his/her acts are generating ripples in the society which are either improving or polluting the society.

Do you audit yourself on how much pollution or prosperity you are contributing to the society?

In our day to day life whether official, personal or social, we have to deal with complications. Some situations are easy to handle with but other are complex which snatch the peace of mind because our brain gets stuck on how best to handle such state of affair. This is where our Analytical Skills help us. The prime purpose for the Analysis of any given situation is to get to know the root cause(s) of the issue, to forecast the impact and to plan corrective/preventive actions strategy. So basically analytical skill is to visualize a given situation, task, project or issue from several angles in order to breakdown it into smaller steps.

Below are different situations where our analytical skills are required. I shall give advices in each category accordingly:

1)When Summarizing Large Amount of Data: In this situation, I highly recommend using Pivot Tables feature of MS Excel in order to generate reports. The Pivot Reports feature allows us playing with the data in several ways to generate multi dimensional reports. We can breakdown large amount of data in different sheets to apply Pivot Reports separately as well. Youtube is a very good source of videos for learning this skill. Pivot table can also generate reports for Trends and Forecast in two to three dimensions.

2)When Resolving Conflicts in Office: In this case, listen to all parties which are having difference of opinion. List down the positive and negative input factors and after-effects based on feedback from individuals. Make it in tabular format and review this with your manager to see which one is the best option to go for. Then call for a meeting to elaborate the overall picture based on your fair analysis and convince personnel for the option which is in the best interest of the company.

3)When Being Assigned a large project: in this case you need to make a high level agenda (High Level Project Deliverables) and then start working on WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) and then assign each task to relevant resource. While making WBS you can have a meeting with your Team Leads and other stake holders. You can consider Fishbone diagram to analyze the inputs of any task. The article written by Junaid Tahir (mjunaidtahir at gmail dot com)

4)When Resolving a Technical issue: The advice here is to consult the product guide to see the possible root causes, consult the SME (Subject Matter Expert) for opinion or consult the Lesson Learnt Register. For all kind of issues resolutions, I always recommend two things. First is to take corrective action to fix the issue, Second is to take Preventive Action (fix the root cause permanently) so that the issues do not pop up again. Six Sigma's DMAIC is another recommended way for analyzing and improving. If you want to learn Six Sigma, either do google search or drop me an email mjunaidtahir at gmail dot com so I can share my knowledge J

5)When purchasing something: Let us take the example of mobile phone. When you want to purchase a new mobile you need to ask yourself: do I need touch screen, do I need wifi, do I really need to purchase new mobile, what is my budget? do I need 5MP camera, do I need iphone or Android, do I need 4 inch screen or less? What other specs do I need to consider. So Basically you are analyzing your demands to come up with the right mobile which is to be purchased.

6)When handling family conflicts: Being a sensitive subject, this is something where you need much more than analytical skills; For each family member involved in the conflict, you have to have sense of feelings, emotions study, stress absorption power, age factor, relationship level and convincing power so in my opinion this is the most difficult part of practicing your analytical skills. You have to consistently guide everyone about 'forgive and forget' policy. You have to calmly listen to each party and take adequate time to analyze all aspects (as mentioned a couple of lines back) vigilantly before concluding something on the brawl. https://groups.google.com/group/ParadigmWisdom

Conclusion: Analytical skills can make your life easier in almost all aspects of decision making or problem solving, however, it's not only the matter of considering all the options and the inputs, its matter of considering the weight of each option as well. For example, for a given situation you have two options having equal number of advantages or disadvantages so in order to conclude in such situation you have to consider the weight of each option. While doing your analysis you might want to consider the difference between Urgent and Important things. If that is the case please read my article http://paradigmwisdom.blogspot.com/2012/01/learn-to-differentiate-between-urgent.html

Develop and Sharpen your analytical skills to take steps for reducing stress in your life consequently ensuring the peace of mind.